ever the liberty to be—when I reached the covered bridge across the mouth of the Moodna.
The small and single lamp, usually making darkness visible at the far end of this rickety old tunnel, was not yet lit. The outline of an entrance, under an arch of hopeless black, was all I could distinguish—a promise of emergence to light on the other side, which required the faith of a gimlet. My horse took a sniff of suspicion, and half bolted; and as he had thrown me over his head a week or two before, and that was my first experience as a one-horse missile, I hesitated a second before putting on the compulsion. In went both heels, however—for it was a bitter cold night, and my lungs are not the customers for winter air without exercise—and in sprung Sir Archy upon the unseen planks. I loosed the rein—instinct being more to be trusted than reason (I have always observed) in "feeling one's way." The smothered sound of the hoofs upon the never-swept carpet of lumber-dust and manure, came down in stifled echoes from the room. Paff! paff! paff!—which side we should bang against, and what hole of the remembered short planks my dancing animal would back into in rearing, I could only guess. A sudden plunge! Half a leap to go over something—but the twitched curb (with the flash across my mind that it was the warped flooring out of place) balked the effort, and the next moment we rose into the air—to explanatory music!
